September 11, 2012

Eleven years ago, I hosted a little dinner party early in September. It was a picture-perfect evening, cool and clear. My garden was lovely with late summer blooms and basil and tomatoes and other vegetables at their peak. I put a long table in the back yard and covered it with my antique crocheted table clothes. I moved the dining room chairs out on the grass, and set the table with china and silver and candlesticks. We had ham and pimento cheese sandwiches. And my friends and I sat in the twilight and laughed and talked and it was wonderful. I don't remember the conversation but I do remember the feeling of love and security and innocence. And then a few days later, it seemed that all that was destroyed in the rubble of falling towers and crashing planes.

When I think about 9/11, that dinner party is my "before." It was a time when we were blissfully naive, unaware of the tragedy that was before us. Even as we sat under the stars, sharing food and fellowship, someone somewhere was planning an elaborate act of destruction.

I've had friends over for supper many times since then. We still laugh and talk and share each other's joys and sorrows. But somehow it is not quite the same. We are not as innocent and trusting as we might have been then. We have seen a side of human nature that is much more evil than we could have imagined that night. But we have also seen a side of human nature that is humbling in its radical love: in people willing to lay down their lives for their friends, and for total strangers; in the tender care of the survivors; in the love and support of those who still live with loss; in the tragedy of the loss of those who could not survive the deaths of those they loved.

Today was another sparkling clear September day. And tonight my garden is lovely, the stars are shining, and I know that love lives in the world, even in the face of terror and evil.

September 8, 2012

The
book of James has gotten a bad rap throughout history. Martin Luther called it the “strawy epistle”
meaning apparently that it lacked substance.
But if you read this little book from beginning to end, you will find
careful and comprehensive instructions about how to live a truly Christian
life.

James
calls on us to care for the most vulnerable, to practice hospitality, to avoid
favoritism, to refrain from actions based in anger, to be generous. James calls on us to be doers of the Word, to
practice our faith, to put our beliefs into action.

We
cannot merely read or hear the Word.
That is not enough.

That
is like looking at ourselves in a mirror, and then going away with no lasting
image of who we are. It is a fleeting
experience that accomplishes nothing. But
looking into the mirror of the law – the Word – and then acting on what we see
there, is the path to blessing.

BUT
– there is a big caveat to all this. Sometimes
we look into the mirror of the word and only see what we want to see. We get all caught up in appearances, in how
things look, and we forget what lies beyond the surface. We spend our efforts on the rules and regulations
and miss the intention of love that lies behind them.

This
is not a new problem. The religious
leaders of Jesus’ time were experts in the law.
They knew every little jot and tittle. They were the keepers of
tradition. And the tradition was important, no doubt about it. Back in the wilderness, after Moses came down
with the tablets of the law, it was the tradition that shaped the children of Israel
into God’s holy people. They were set
apart from the pagans around them by everyday customs – what they ate, how they
dressed, what kind of relationships they could have, how they worshiped. Those traditions were important because they
put the Law, the Word, into action. They
were guidelines for how to live.

But
somewhere along the way, the tradition – not the Word – became the focus. Being religious came to mean keeping the
rules. The rules had built up over the
years, layer by layer by layer, so they almost obscured the precious shining
intention of the Law that was their foundation.

And
the religious leaders took on the job of enforcing the rules, which put them in
conflict with Jesus. Jesus was a
rule-breaker! But not just for the sake
of being contrary or combative. Jesus
broke the rules anywhere the rules had become instruments of exclusion.

Take
this story about the rule for hand washing before eating. It doesn’t seem to so bad, does it? After all, we are supposed to do the same
thing, for health reasons now, of course, not religious ones. What could be the problem with requiring
people to wash their hands?

Well,
think about this part of the world in the first century. A lot of the land was desert. Water was scarce. Getting enough water to drink and farm with
took a lot of effort. Poor people needed
to use their precious water as carefully as possible, and pouring it out on
their hands before a meal was an extravagance they could not afford.

The
Pharisees and the scribes, on the other hand, were among society’s elite. They were relatively wealthy, supported by
gifts to the synagogue. They did not
have to travel miles to draw water each day.
They did not have to worry about the lack of rain when the wheat was in
the field. They did not have to ensure
that the thirsty could drink. All that
was taken care of for them. They could
afford to wash their hands, to be clean before they ate.

And
this simple little rule, this tradition gone astray, had the effect of creating
divisions. The rich were able to keep
themselves pure, according to the rules of religion, while the poor, even those
who were deeply faithful, were considered ritually unclean and declared impure.

And
Jesus stepped into this division between the leaders and the people, the rich
and the poor, those who thought themselves pure and those who could not keep
the burdensome rules. He reminded them
what the Word, the Law, was really about.
It was not about separating people; it was not about creating second-class
citizens; it was not about a practice that had become divorced from its
original intention. In fact, Jesus said,
it didn’t matter at all what happened on the outside. Purity could only come from within. And washing
one’s hands was no substitute for having a clean heart.

But
what does this have to do with us – if anything? We wash our hands because that is good
hygiene, not because we think it makes us holy and pure. In our church, our denomination, we don’t have
all those rules about what to eat and what to wear and how to deal with
leprosy.

Maybe
not. But perhaps we have our own version
of the ancient rules. We love our church and we depend on our own laws to help
us know how to act. Heaven knows,
Presbyterians love their rules, their Book of Order! We debate doctrine ad naseum.

But
when the rules become a means of creating divisions, of sorting the faithful
into this group versus that group, of declaring some of us second-class, then like
the ancient Pharisees, we have become purely religious, not religiously
pure. We have forgotten what God’s word
really looks like.

A
clue to how we are supposed to be together in the church lies in the origin of
the word religion. It comes from a Latin
word that means to bind up again. Pure
religion ties together what has been separated.
Pure religion connects us again into a whole body. Pure religion is about unity, not division.

If
we are to be doers of the Word, then everything we do must lead to wholeness
and unity and equality. That is the
source of our strength. A single stick
can be snapped, but a bundle tied together cannot be easily broken. Together we can withstand the pressures of
the world. Together we are strong. Together in our diversity we are the image
of God, reflected in the mirror of the Word.

So
let us be doers of the Word, the precious shining Word, that binds us all together
in God’s love.